I find it very interesting that the author is trying o look at the world from a different perspective than mathematics. He thinks atoms as a language that have grammar and meanings. He thinks mathematical rules cannot fully explain our world because it is too objective. He involves the idea of language to describe how the world is entangled and relational. As we learned in TOK, language is an important AOK that shows human civilization in a very complicated way. Language is flexible, emotional and relational. It gives things meaning as human likes to assign meaning and pattern to things around. The world around us are not just cold fact, we as observers give them meaning to exist. In that sense, the concept of language can better help us depict the world. --Sissi (2/27/2017)

I think this is a very striking discovery because it gives us possibilities that there might be alien lives. We have been searching potential planet that can sustain life for a long time and now scientists claim that they have found one at 40 light year away from us. It may lead us to discovery of new living creatures. --Sissi (2/27/2017)

I found this article very interesting as it says that there are actually people who are afraid of living forever. As we see in history, almost every king is in search of ways to live forever. They are afraid of death because they don't know what they would become after death. It's like playing a game. When you work your role up to level one hundred, you will really cherish this role and don't want to have it dead. Eternity, whether to be alive or dead forever, is fearful when people think about it. The author related the reason with the logic of evolution and our development of front lobe in our brain. We are afraid of eternity because we are afraid of things that we cannot see. We cannot think of anything that's beyond eternity. It is a really terrifying feeling when you think deep about death, it feels like a blackhole that suck up your strength and hard to get out. --Sissi (2/24/2017)

As we learned in TOK, science is more about being interesting and useful than being the truth. I think this is a great example of science being interesting and useful. It also shows that science needs a lot of imagination and creativity. I find myself being bounded by the conventions I learned in school. I have never imagined that water could actually freezes at boiling point. --Sissi (2/23/2017)

I found this article very interesting as it talks about how empathy as a emotion is sometimes bad for us. I really like the point when the author mention that the empathy is not in our biological inheritance because our tribal nature is to care more for those closest to us. It is very interesting to think how our modern society shapes our emotions and behavior, and how empathy is gradually becoming our nature. --Sissi (2/22/2017)

This article discuss the impact of internet on local news organizations. I agree with the author that the internet do get a lot of ad money and make local news organizations have less funding. Although there are donations, it is still very little compare to what local news organizations used to have. This might be part of the reason why local news organizations don't do well on giving great informations.But I think the time is moving forward, Facebook and google should take some of the responsibility as they get more funding and resources. This article is very persuasive as it has many data and evidence in support. I really like that the author acknowledge the counterargument in his article to make it more reliable. --Sissi (2/22/2017)

I think this article is very interesting because it is trying to explain human social behaviors through chemistry and biology. Although there are a lot of factors in human science, by converting it to a natural science problem, we can make the question easier to answer. It also shows the interaction between different subfields of science. --Sissi (2/20/2017)

I think this article goes a little bit over to this gender issue. I think the author might be too sensitive about it. When I first heard about this news, I felt nothing wrong. I even think it might be a good thing to have a boy doll so that dolls are not dominated by girls. However, this viewpoint in this article is kind of different from mine. The author thinks by having boy dolls, the children are being taught the stereotyping of both gender and it has a bad influence especially on little girls and their interpretation of women rights in the future. Although this viewpoint is very interesting to acknowledge, I still think the author is getting overly sensitive and idealistic. The American Girl is essentially a company, not some social organization. It cares about what the general public likes, not much about whether the action is right is wrong. Everything has two sides. In this case, I think having a boy doll can be an innovative move of the company. --Sissi (2/20/2017)

The popularity of a meme can sometimes reflect on the culture online and how people feel about the current events. I think the popularity of the Trash Dove might be suggesting that people feel negative about this world because the meaning behind the Trash Dove is that "They're like beautiful doves, except they eat trash". I feel like this meaning is ironic. Internet is such transparent space that every big hit somehow reflect people's value and opinion. --Sissi (2/16/2017)

I found it very interesting that there is actually people accusing the New York Times. I remember on the biased news graph we saw in the TOK, the New York Times, it is in the rank-two group of media. Although it is obviously not the best source of news, it is not that bad that is "overwhelmed by ignorance and bias". The first quote in this article is very interesting as the author modified the advertisement from "truth" to "propaganda", suggesting that the mass media now value profit more than providing fair news sources. --Sissi (February. 15, 2017)

Alternative facts are spooky things that confuse us between what we think is happening and what's really taking place. In this article, the author uses the example of Davy to suggest that treating the data objectively is what science should be doing. Data is tricky in science because we can draw different conclusions from the same set of data. Just like the line drawing game we played in TOK, there are infinite numbers of lines we can draw to connect all the data point, but there is only one that would be true. As the author shown in this article, the best way to avoid creating alternative facts is to leave out our emotion and personal opinion and let the data speak. Although intuition and imagination is good for science, but for most of the times, we need to remind ourselves not to force the data.

In TOK, we discussed about the what language can affect us. Language doesn't shape who we are, but it oblige us to think in certain ways. By speaking in different languages, we can switch among different mindsets. In this article, the author also uses the example of the descriptive snow words in Eskimos cliche to show that language can enable us to see through different lenses since different languages focus on different stresses and significances. The "time traveler" in the title doesn't give the literal meaning, we get to travel from time to time because we can see beyond linear bounds of time. We are switching perspective from one observer of time to another observer of time. --Sissi (2/13/2017)

Although many people allege themselves being scientific when trying to convince others by using the scientific researches they read on the mass media, does that really make their points more reliable? Not really. The popular science is sometimes not as meticulous as the academic article article written for experts. In popular science articles, the authors often changed their writing style to favor the general population, like having a more certain tone. This appeals to readers' desire for simplicity and this tendency is called the "easiness effect", which I find is really similar to the logic fallacy we talked about in TOK. Science itself has more and more become a table that can make an argument seem more rational. However, science is all about the scientific method used in the research that is an art of systematic simplification. Without these element, the title "science" means nothing. --Sissi (2/10/2017)

I find this research interesting. In this research, the researchers did a population observation, which is similar to the population method mentioned in evolutionary biology. The author also discussed a lot of hypothesis why the first born child tends to have better thinking skills. The author don't have direct evidence pointing to his hypothesis, the tendency is a fact. Although there are a lot of uncertainties in this research, this result might appeal to many first born children and make them feel a little more superior. --Sissi (2/9/2017)

We tends to give labels and stereotypes to a group of people, and the psychopaths is just another group of people that has been incorrectly depicted. The social media plays a big part in this case. The Hollywood creates psychopaths as highly intelligent evil genius to make the characters and storyline more interesting. However, it is far from the actual fact, but the viewers and the general public take this image as a reality. Since people tend to be lazy, they eager to receive information rather than find the information themselves. Due to the exposure effect, the image of psychopaths being evil but highly intelligent becomes the mainstream impression on psychopaths. Correcting the image of psychopaths in our head can help us better understand their behaviors without making unfair judgments. --Sissi (2/9/2017)

I have sometimes think about this issue and the explanation I come up is that when we are seven, one year is one seventh of our live. When we are seventy, the denominator get much bigger and the proportion get significantly smaller, one seventieth. I am very surprised to find that the scientists have similar theory. It also shows how unreliable our sense perception is. We are very unreliable about time since time is a concept that we cannot see or touch. How we feel about time largely depends on our individual emotion. Our brain also tends to remember the first times and we also have a tendency to believe vivid memory. --Sissi (2/8/2017)

This article shows a very interesting stereotyping that rich people ought to be fat and poor people ought to be thin. It reminded me of I video I have just seen, in which a poor but fat woman is trying to explain why now people in poverty is more likely to be fat. She shows us some comments from people when they hear that she is very poor. The vehement reaction and bad language they used showed that this stereotyping is very deep in our society. However, time is very different now. Food is not as expensive as we think, what is expensive is actually healthy food, that's why poor people tends to be fat. My grandpa once told me that when he was young, he was confused why poor people in Honking movie are eating chicken legs. This is the result of the transformation of society.--Sissi (2/8/2017)

This article shows that how unreliable our memory is. Every night when we go to sleep, our memory is edited and our brain would delete some irrelevant things. So our memory is not a primary source and I think the words of witnesses on the court can only be a reference, not a direct evidence. Also, in this article, the author states the uncertainties and limits of the experiment, showing that the result of the experiment in this stage can only serves as a suggestion, not a direct evidence. --Sissi (2/7/2017)

Although we might think patients in a completely locked-in state should be miserable about their life because they are not able to communicate. However, the new brain-to-computer interface shows result that totally the opposite of our expectation. It shows that they very much cherish the opportunity that they can still be alive. Related to TOK, I think it shows how we all tend to understand others through our own perspective. Since we are not in threat of live, we don't feel the strong desire for life. --Sissi Jian (2/7/2017)

I really like the author stating that "Of course, these tendencies are generalizations." This shows that this study is not to categorize people into east and west, two groups. But this tendency is worth-noticing. The trials presented in the article shows different possibilities of why there is a difference. I think this cultural difference is similar to why Australia has very distinctive animal compare to the other continents. Since in the ancient times, westerners and easterners are isolated to each other, they took different approaches to develop their civilization. However, I really like the author emphasizing that this difference is not a stereotyping, it is the result of population analysis and observations. --Sissi (2/6/2017)